A devoted sports car driver, Alex Proud has swapped his beloved DB9 for
a family-friendly Ford, which has sparked an existential crisis

Last week I sat in my brand new, (or rather, second-hand) Ford people carrier. It was a moment. I had a moment. A bit of a wobble. I stopped sucking in my stomach and let my belly flop. I looked in the rear-view mirror and appraised my chin honestly. It’s not a single chin any more; it has a friend. I brushed the messy, tangled fluff of my hair back to reveal the acres of gleaming pate. Inevitably, I asked myself, “Where did it all go wrong, Alex?”

Some of you may recall my recent article onwhy every man should own a DB9 or a Jaguar F type, whether he can afford one or not. I held forth at length about how letting middle age, kids and even income preventing you from fulfilling your dream was to deny the very existence of your Y chromosome. I waxed lyrical about the beauty of my own Aston and its superiority over chavvy Ferraris and vulgar, showy Buggatis. I declaimed that I could not live without this thing of beauty in my life. And yet here I am.

Last week I sold my Aston Martin DB9 and my 1979 Lancia Beta Spyder.

Aston Martin DB9: A flashy car does not make you GeorgeClooney

It gets worse. A bit later on last week, after seven wonderful years, Jaguar Land Rover noticed an admin error in their records and took me off their VIP car list. With a single keystroke, my access to massively discounted top-of-the-line Jags and luxury Land Rovers came to an end. Only then did I realise that, for the best part of a decade, I’d effectively been on benefits for very rich people.

Once a couple of bad things have happened to you, life gains a negative momentum of its own. So, pretty soon, I found myself swept along in an avalanche of status anxiety and downward mobility.

On my first full day as a member of the Ford-driving hoi polloi, I parked outside the multiplex (in for a penny...) and a huge Land Rover, driven by a hot ex’s hedge fund manager husband almost parked on top of my humble people carrier. The kids in the back screamed, partly through fear, but mainly because they had no Land Rover entertainment systems to distract them from the continual reminders of their father’s brutal vehicular emasculation.

As the door to the Land Rover opened, I felt my manhood shrivel further into my shorts, and watched my belly swell with shame; what little remained of my hair fluttered into the footwell in an attempt to divorce itself from the indignity of being mine. While this was going on, the hot ex stepped out of the car, looking like she was on a normcore Vogue shoot, while her Paris Hilton-esque dog, quite rightly, cocked its leg on the wheel of my Ford. Of course, the hot ex was at our local multiplex for a spot of hip consumer slumming. I was there unironically.

I looked at the Ford again and recalled those youthful jokes where a cool car was called a fanny magnet. This was the opposite. It was a fanny repellent, a kind of DEET for beautiful people. My brain repurposed that Anchorman joke about Sex Panther cologne: “100% of the time, it works none of the time.” I realised that I’d also become used to the wistful looks of other male drivers and the unprompted shouts of “cool car, mate” from eight-year-old boys. I’d even learned to take the calls of “polar bear killer” from the children of Guardian readers as a raffish kind of compliment. But with a Ford people carrier, there’s none of this. You may as well be invisible.

It’s funny: when you’re surrounded by things like Aston Martins and Michelin-starred restaurants and private jets to Courchevel for skiing weekends, you don’t laugh or look down on people who live normally. You’re not the Mr Burns caricature of a callous, rich scumbag. But you do get used to it. And, after a while, it stops occurring to you that an Aston Martin is not a normal car to drive.

So when you see an overweight dad stumbling out of a people carrier with three screaming children in tow, you don’t sneer at him or even pity him. He’s just a bit irrelevant to you. But then you remember that the Aston is now someone else’s Aston, and that you’re standing in front of a plate-glass window at the local Tesco Extra and that the dad is your reflection.

Around this point you enter the third stage in the Kübler-Ross model of grief: bargaining. You start start telling yourself things like "I could move to be Middlesborough and be rich" and "Most people who drive Range Rovers are w----rs" and "At least I don’t have Ebola". Then the true horror sinks in and the future stretches ahead of you like a road. A flat grey road. A flat grey road you will drive down for the next 40 years at 60 mph in your Ford people carrier. The next vehicle you own will be a mobility scooter.

Here it is traditional for men to seek solace in great art and cheap booze. So I lay on the sofa listlessly drinking white wine and endlessly rewatching the final moments of Goodfellas, looking for solace or at least solidarity in Henry Hill’s fate. The bit where, facing his future in a cookie-cutter suburban nowhere, he says sulkily, “I have to wait around like everyone else... I’m an average nobody. I have to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”

I’d probably have stayed supine on the sofa marinating in self-pity and nostalgia for days but we had people down for the weekend and I love entertaining. So, I raised myself from my slough of despond and, in short order, ten of us were in the people carrier on our way to the pub. As we wound our way through the East Sussex lanes in the affluent, dappled sunlight, something unexpected happened: it occurred me that perhaps it was better to have ten friends in a people carrier than to be in an Aston with only a V12 and earplugs for company. This unexpectedly upbeat thought was followed by another: that maybe losing the Aston was a small price to pay the new house I had just bought for my family.

Weirdly, my friends even complimented me on the Ford. I don’t think they were taking the piss either, although given my reputation for self-awareness, I may be wrong. Also, when we crunched into the gravelly carpark, I didn’t get the looks from other customers that I got with the Aston. You know those looks: "Hello, London w----r, down for the weekend?"

The are other positives too. The kids love it. It’s roomier, it’s far more comfortable, there’s a huge sun-roof which they love and the seats in the back are proper, adjustable seats rather than the afterthoughts you get in sports cars. My wife is also a fan. The Ford is easier for her to drive and park and she doesn’t look ridiculous getting out of it. Also, as women see the disappearance of any sports car as a huge moral victory, she was nice to me for 15 minutes after the men came to collect the Aston.

So I decided to reappraise the Ford. Spend some more time with it. Stop viewing it as a mobile prison for my ego. Stop viewing it as "not the Aston".

The funny thing is, I quite like it too. It does miles to the gallon, rather than gallons to the mile. It’s quite a novelty seeing a quarter of a tank and thinking “no problem.” The part of my brain that once geeked out over unnecessary torque and useless horsepower now gets all keen over untold hundreds of miles between petrol stops. And it’s not just the practical stuff either. Once I got over my dumb badge snobbery, it is a better car to drive. It handles well, even at speed, and is absurdly comfy. It doesn’t have four-wheel drive (but I don’t live on a farm) and it has almost all the toys the £70k Land Rover had, while costing me £200 a month to lease.

As I’ve said earlier, people look at me differently – but maybe I view at myself a bit differently too. At the end of a recent journey, I looked in the mirror and realised we’d spent the entire journey chatting and playing number plate games and I-Spy. Suddenly, I felt like a good dad, rather than a middle aged man who half believes that a flashy car makes him George Clooney.

As I exited the people carrier, I mused that I would be 45 in a couple of weeks, and that my kids and family are everything to me. That spending money on things that make the people I love happy rather than on some James Bond fantasy might make sense. That, in some ways, the Ford was a badge of honour and a sign that I had finally ended my extended adolescence and learned to value the things that really matter. It was a strange – and rather lovely - feeling.

Don’t worry, it passed quickly. By early 2015, I reckon I’ll have cleared the financial hurdle of buying a new house and I’m pretty sure the business will be going well enough for me to re-enter the world of environmental destruction on four wheels. While we’re at it, I didn’t go completely cold turkey either, I kept the old Range Rover Sport with the supercharged Jag Engine in it.

Still, I have a new respect for Ford, ordinary drivers and the simple pleasures of mass-market motoring. I’m sure it’ll last, at least until I take delivery of my 2015 DB9. After that, I give it 15 minutes.